dirname Returns parent directory's path &reftitle.description; stringdirname stringpath Given a string containing the path of a file or directory, this function will return the parent directory's path. &reftitle.parameters; path A path. On Windows, both slash (/) and backslash (\) are used as directory separator character. In other environments, it is the forward slash (/). &reftitle.returnvalues; Returns the path of the parent directory. If there are no slashes in path, a dot ('.') is returned, indicating the current directory. Otherwise, the returned string is path with any trailing /component removed. &reftitle.changelog; &Version; &Description; 5.0.0 dirname is now binary safe 4.0.3 dirname was fixed to be POSIX-compliant. &reftitle.examples; ]]> &reftitle.notes; dirname operates naively on the input string, and is not aware of the actual filesystem, or path components such as "..". dirname is locale aware, so for it to see the correct directory name with multibyte character paths, the matching locale must be set using the setlocale function. Since PHP 4.3.0, you will often get a slash or a dot back from dirname in situations where the older functionality would have given you the empty string. Check the following change example: ]]> &reftitle.seealso; basename pathinfo realpath